Alzheimer’s brains are in a constant state of inflammation. But why doesn’t that inflammation switch off on its own?
A protein involved in cellular transport turns out to limit serious brain damage in mice. And it works across two distinct neurological diseases.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the brain’s immune system stays permanently switched on. Researchers at Scripps Research have now identified the protein responsible and, for the first time, explained exactly why it gets stuck…
When it comes to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, attention typically focuses on neurons dying.
The brain has its own immune cells that are supposed to clean up toxic debris, including the protein clumps linked to Alzheimer’s disease. With age, they become less effective.
The tau protein, best known for its role in Alzheimer’s disease, appears to be involved in how neurons respond to DNA damage during cell cycle activation.
CBD is best known for easing pain or anxiety. But new research in mice suggests it may also suppress inflammation in the brain.
Not everyone’s brain ages at the same pace. A single gene variant appears to make neurons more resistant to harm.
Population aging raises dementia rates. But particulate air pollution does too, and possibly more than expected. New research compares the two effects for the first time in a systematic way.
Tau protein is best known as a culprit in Alzheimer’s disease. But it turns out to play an entirely different role too: encoding long-term memories.
Just two doses of a nasal spray improved memory and cognitive function in aging mice for several months.
Eating without being hungry: almost everyone knows the feeling. But which brain cells actually give permission to keep eating, even after you have had enough?
You eat something, and your body knows almost immediately whether it contains enough building blocks. But how?
A protein best known from cancer research turns out to play a key role in brain aging.
An enzyme that received little scientific attention turns out to play a major role in amyloid accumulation in the brain.
A closely watched experimental Parkinson’s treatment has failed its first major clinical test.
Meeting current vitamin B12 guidelines might not be enough to protect the aging brain.
Sleep is not a passive state. While we sleep, the brain produces rhythmic electrical patterns that directly influence how memories are stored.
Tuberculosis still kills more than a million people every year. Older adults are far more likely to die from it than younger people.
The same protein accumulates in the brains of patients with more than twenty different diseases.
The number of clinical trials testing Alzheimer’s drugs is rising steadily. Yet approved treatments remain few. Researchers reviewed 192 ongoing trials to map where the field stands.
A single brain scan and an algorithm. That combination may be enough to predict whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s, how fast their cognition will decline, and how severe the diagnosis will be…
Old mice with Alzheimer’s features behaved like healthy young animals after a nanoparticle treatment. The therapy addresses two of the brain’s core problems at the same time.
Every bacterium in your body constantly sends out tiny molecular packages. A new hypothesis proposes that the build-up of these packages in the brain contributes to neurodegenerative disease.
Most people with dementia do not have one disease. They have two or three simultaneously. That makes treatment research far more complicated than assumed for decades.
Forgetting where you put your keys may not be inevitable. A non-invasive brain stimulation technique targeting a specific network appears to selectively improve episodic memory in both healthy people and clinical patients…
One gene shapes Alzheimer’s risk more than any other. But the two most studied variants — one harmful, one protective — have remained poorly understood at the molecular level.
Neurons must survive for decades without dividing. That makes DNA repair critical — and a new study shows one key repair protein loses its footing with age.
Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is associated with a 35 percent lower risk of dementia.
The brains of Alzheimer’s patients contain cells with DNA errors not found in healthy brains.
Genetically identical animals in the same environment still behave differently from each other. And their behavior shifts over time with no identifiable trigger. That is not noise.
When neurons die, they do not simply stop working. They send out signals that damage surrounding healthy cells. Researcher Chaska Walton is developing a targeted delivery system to interrupt that process.
Until now, neuroscientists could distinguish at most two types of nerve cells at the same time while recording from a freely moving animal. A new technique raises that number to nine.
Obesity raises the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The link has been suspected for years, but the underlying biology was murky. A new review maps the shared mechanisms in detail.
The active compound in magic mushrooms reduces cocaine-seeking behaviour in animal models. That alone is notable.
Older people often say time seems to pass faster than it used to. A new theory links this to a concrete mechanism: the energy deficit in aging cells.
A gene already connected to a rare form of intellectual disability turns out to play a central role in regulating sleep.
The brain isn’t a fixed structure. It reorganizes itself continuously as we grow up, following predictable patterns — and a new study maps those patterns in more detail than ever before.
Muscle loss in older age isn’t just about inactivity or poor diet. The junctions where nerves tell muscles to work are quietly deteriorating — and new research suggests targeted light treatment could…
In ALS and a form of frontotemporal dementia, a protein called TDP-43 clumps together in nerve cells — and kills them.
The immune system doesn’t stay neatly separate from the brain. As it ages and becomes chronically inflamed, it appears to actively promote dementia and other neurological diseases — a connection that may…
Whether something tastes sweet depends not just on what you eat, but on how much energy your body has.
Scientists have grown human brain tissue in a laboratory that spontaneously organises into the layered structure of the cerebral cortex.
A large language model performed at physician level on clinical reasoning tasks, according to a new study in Science. The result is striking. The caveats are just as important.
For years, researchers blamed a specific type of nerve damage in the inner ear for age-related hearing struggles. A new study suggests they may have been looking in the wrong place.
Drug development for epilepsy has always faced a frustrating bottleneck: waiting for a seizure to happen.
Millions of people are already experimenting with senolytic treatments to slow aging. A new study now shows that one of the most popular combinations causes brain damage strikingly similar to multiple sclerosis…
By the time someone forgets a name or gets lost on a familiar route, Alzheimer’s disease may have been quietly progressing in their brain for twenty or thirty years.
A quick afternoon nap sounds harmless — even healthy. But a new study suggests that older adults who nap frequently and for long stretches face a significantly higher risk of dying sooner…
Why does one person develop severe Alzheimer’s while another with equally damaged brain tissue stays sharp into their eighties?
Your brain has a built-in system for clearing out damaged proteins. As we age, that system becomes increasingly impaired — and researchers have now identified a likely culprit: oxidative stress disables the…
A new fluorescent sensor can track the release of GABA — the brain’s main braking signal — in freely moving animals for the first time.
A worm barely a millimeter long can sniff out bacteria enriched with a specific amino acid it cannot make itself.
Dasatinib and quercetin — the most widely used senolytic combination in longevity circles — causes damage to specific brain regions in mice that closely resembles what is seen in multiple sclerosis.
The most advanced Alzheimer’s treatments ever developed can now demonstrably remove the protein clumps long blamed for the disease. Patients, however, are barely improving.
Astrocytes make up roughly half the cells in the human brain and do far more than support neurons.
Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. That has been known for decades. What happens next in the body, and when, is far less understood.
The brain’s outer layer is built like a six-story building, and each floor has different jobs.
Your brain produces constant rhythmic electrical pulses. One of those rhythms — the alpha wave — turns out to be a key gatekeeper of perception, determining in real time what you detect…
Two studies in Science have produced the most detailed picture yet of how individual brain cells develop differently in Down syndrome.
Surviving malaria is not the same as escaping it unharmed. New research shows the infection can leave measurable cognitive damage that persists long after the parasite is gone.
A small molecule that blocks a key inflammation trigger in the brain has cleared its first human trial without serious side effects.
Male and female brains look largely the same. But at the level of individual cell types, a new study finds striking differences in which genes are switched on — with direct implications…
Every cell in your body is constantly building proteins — the molecules that do nearly everything. But exactly how that production is controlled has remained surprisingly murky.
The human brain is bad at quantities — and that appears to be a feature, not a bug.
When mice are trained to fear a specific odor, the structure of their offspring’s smell system changes — even though those offspring never encountered the scent themselves.
The big folds of the human brain have been mapped for over a century. But there is a second layer of smaller, shallower folds that most imaging studies have simply ignored —…
Anxiety isn’t spread diffusely across the brain. Researchers pinpointed a specific population of neurons in a rarely discussed brain region that flicks on under stress and directly drives anxious behaviour in mice…
After decades of research focused on amyloid plaques and tau tangles, a study points to a neglected signalling molecule in the brain — and drugs that target it already exist.
Tau protein is present in almost every brain over the age of eighty, yet most people never develop dementia.
The same technique that has transformed cancer treatment — reprogramming immune cells to hunt down disease — is now being aimed at Alzheimer’s.
When chronic pain persists long after an injury has healed, many assume the problem lies in the brain.
The blood-brain barrier keeps harmful substances out of the brain. For decades it was treated as a near-impenetrable wall.
When you picture an apple in your mind, your brain activates many of the same neurons as when you actually see one.
Older adults who received a high-dose flu vaccine showed a greater reduction in dementia risk than those who got the standard shot.
Newborns sleep sixteen hours a day. Adults need seven or eight. Everyone knows this changes, but almost no one knows why.
APOE4 is the most powerful known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. But what does it actually do in the brain, long before the first symptoms appear?
Instead of targeting amyloid or tau — the usual suspects in Alzheimer’s research — scientists focused on a neuropeptide that had been sitting in the background for decades.
A quarter of older patients become confused after surgery. It sounds temporary. But the brain damage often isn’t. Now researchers have identified a potential mechanism — and a place to intervene.
To eventually grow replacement organs — or even whole bodies — scientists first need to understand how an embryo does it.
Before a single memory slips, something has already gone wrong deep in the brain. Mice carrying the most dangerous genetic variant for Alzheimer’s have smaller, chronically overexcited neurons — and researchers have…
Millions of people carry the APOE4 gene, the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Around a quarter of older people become acutely confused after surgery. Most recover, but the episode leaves a mark: it permanently accelerates cognitive decline.
A blood test that can detect Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear sounds like unambiguous progress.
Researchers have developed a way to control nerve cells using light pulses — without the genetic modifications that have made this technique impractical in humans.
We’ve known for years that gum disease is bad for your heart. Now the evidence is growing that the same bacteria colonising your gums may also be reaching your brain — and…
Adolescents have long been known to cooperate less than adults. New research now reveals what is happening internally: it is not only that they are worse at reading others — they also…
Two of the most well-known genetic risk factors for Parkinson’s disease both disrupt the same cellular process: waste disposal.
The importance of gut bacteria in early life is well established. But how the microbial residents of the intestine contribute to gut movement itself — the muscular contractions that push food through…
Parkinson’s disease begins in the power plants of cells. Researchers have now found a way to deliver healthy versions of those power plants directly into diseased neurons — packaged inside an unexpected…
LDL cholesterol has long been flagged as a cardiovascular risk factor. Now evidence is building that oxidized LDL particles play a specific role in vascular dementia — through a mechanism that starts…
The gut microbiome sends a constant stream of chemical signals to the brain. In people with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, that microbial community looks systematically different — and researchers are now asking…
Stress is the most reliable trigger for alcohol relapse. A new study in mice and rats maps the specific neural circuit responsible — and shows how alcohol actively disrupts the very mechanism…
Stress is the most reliable trigger for alcohol relapse. A new study in mice and rats maps the specific neural circuit responsible — and shows how alcohol actively disrupts the very mechanism…